Great video. A subject I've become quite familiar with over the last few years. After watching an episode of Look Around You the TH-cam gods recommended a few explainer videos on Hauntology, then I got into watching the various Mark Fisher lectures on repeat, and it then just spiralled from there. I think Fisher really illuminated for me the notion that neoliberalism has effectively destroyed music and popular culture as a force of any potency. Those 30 years of the post-war consensus created the unique conditions that allowed so many incredible artists to flourish. You can almost track the decline as neoliberalism truly started to assert itself as the dominant all encompassing ideology. The 80s and 90s were the hangover, but you could see things slowly starting to degrade as the 2000s wore on. It's something I think about a lot.
Interesting, think back pre-internet how music and art were very local......certain towns, cities having a certain "sound". I think the Internet absolutely killed that.
Great video! Mark Fisher is a hero of mine, and has figured very heavily in my current academic work as I work toward my MFA. I’m going to use this to show folks the relevance of social theory to everyday life.
Broadcast are a very important band for me. I love you Trish! Stereolab, m'eh. Portishead? Darkly amazing crackle-core. Boards Of Canada's 'Geogaddi' is just such a classic. I think the DLP myth is slightly spurious but they're grimly great all the same. Bryars, Burial? All good :-)
I gotta say while I have looked into and have been fascinated with hauntology as a philosophical theory, I have yet to think of it in terms of art, specifically music in this case. Great video exploring this. It gives me a lot to think about.
When I saw the title, I thought maybe The Fall (Part 2), but was not disappointed! I’m a member in good standing of the Broadcast/BOC/Stereolab club, so found their placement in the musical hauntology realm (“genre” doesn’t really cover it) very interesting. This seems to have kinship with the idea of liminal spaces. Past futures that never were, as you said. i’m pleased to just now discover your channel and have lots to catch up on. Thank you!
I'm looking forward to the new year, when my current series of videos is done, and I can return to more (but less regular) of this kind of thing...including part two of The Fall! I have notes and assorted stuff prepared for that one, and would love to finish what I started. Glad you enjoyed the video, hope you find more around here that float your boat. Cheers, D
Many of Joe Meek's production work from the 50s and 60s definitely has a haunting quality as well, famous examples are Telstar and John Leyton's Johnny Remember Me... but there are a lot (a lot!) more gems and intriguing one or less hit (could have been contenders?) wonders. Point being (I guess): he had an interesting way to manipulate the sound of the studio to haunting effect. The racing game Retrowave has a very interesting Vaporwave soundtrack. There's a playlist on TH-cam. Recommended! Such a trippy game. Poor Fukuyama! History's still going... d'oh!
I was previously unfamiliar with this concept, but as you were defining it, I wondered if you were going to mention vapor wave, which I had been exposed to prior. Funnily enough, the theology professor that performed my wedding ceremony wrote her thesis on Derrida, though we never discussed it in detail since I was (and still am) unfamiliar with his work. I'm always grateful to learn new things, and your videos have become a favorite source of new information.
Thanks Chris. Yeah Derrida's a big name in modern philosophical thought...the whole idea of "deconstruction" was his, so a very influential thinker in post-modern circles. Cheers, D
Thought provoking. Surely beauty is in the Ear of the beholder? For me, music provides emotional triggers, it stirs your soul. How can someone I have never met bring me to tears or make me jump up and demonstrate horrific Dad dancing? That's why its my antidote to the discipline, rigour, logic and detachment of the everyday existence. I too mourn the loss of small venues, always the best way to experience live music. I feel this was driven by the flip from Touring to promote record/CD sales to the Streaming era, where ticket sales became the main source of income for Bands and their labels. As an optimist, on the theme of Hauntology being about what we lost or what might have been, in time the addiction to social media will decline and re-ignite our desire for community and a resurgence in small, local "arts" venues. You may say I'm a dreamer...
When the rubber hits the road, all critical theory goes out the window and you're left with the one question..."Do I like it?"...So, yes, this stuff is fun to speculate about and expound upon, but it doesn't really matter in the end. I do think the current model is unsustainable, and hope that things improve...but if recent history has taught us anything, it's that just when you think things have got as bad as they could, well...y'know. All you can do as a listener is support the music you love where and when you can, and hope common sense prevails somewhere down the line. Cheers, D
A declared interest: Several of these bands are among my all-time favourites - Boards of Canada, Stereolab, Broadcast (and a related aside - I meant to ask if you enjoyed Jane Weaver - her last few albums have been, for me, astonishingly good, and Modern Kosmology is almost a dialog or duet with Broadcast at times). As I've said before somewhere, BoC sound like memories feel, especially when you grow to recognise your own unreliability. Even where their sounds aren't actually a part of that time at all, they create how those memories sounded and wrap an undercurrent into the partially recalled, very much a hug from the past with spikes in it that makes both past and present more vivid even if it's at the cost of literal accuracy. The warp, glaze and wooze of theirs is an aural equivalent of the decay of photographs and the mind's eye. This band changed my life, man, by feeling like they were always a part of it. Or something. But anyway, a couple of other thoughts that I had watching. Firstly Lynch, who launches your musical alt futures, is fascinating for how he has also managed to warp the historic music he uses, to somehow retroactively render it hauntological, impossible to hear without its use in reinforcing his movie's moods supplanting it's real history and recasting the 1950s in ways there was no articulation for at the time. It's very hard to hear an Apple Pie Harmony and Love 50s song these days without it immediately introducing a creeping dread that is very much about what we've done since. He's a darker Dennis Potter perhaps, given how Potter reframed lives lived in music by colonising the songs with his character's dreams of never achieved futures. My point, perhsis, is that the exploration of the politics and feelings of lost/alternative histories/futures through music involves many contexts and can actively warp backwards Secondly, there are some wonderful things going on in the "men in their 50s make synth music" world that isn't "just" the Ghost Boxification sound. I'm thinking of three very different engagement with our environment - whether personal, political or emotional - through old instrumentation and decaying or doctored sounds. I'm thinking firstly of Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan (or WazzaRunco Thingy as me and my mates refer to him in short). His music is explicitly based on the lost futures dreamt post war, and the ghosts of a lost economy and the attitudes of those paternalistic town planners who wanted to build streets in the sky, and ended up making something very different. As flawed as the economic or social planning was, and as a result of how these futures were all exterminated in the erasure of Thatcher's 70s, now some of those ageing or delapidated buildings are the only landmarks to negotiate the bleak wasteland that became of working class economic reality. It's almost as if the buildings themselves are the ghosts, and his music contains that mood as a haunting, as well as a swell of anger that starts with the presumptions of the planners and burns as the remnants of the lost future becomes more derelict. Second, there's the gorgeous Craven Faults, plugging into a far older environment of nature, not pastoral or romantic, but utterly rooted in actual places of remote isolation and long weathered geology. Again using analog Synths He somehow makes the most organic and personal sounds from the chattering machines and rotating tapes, sounds that very much allow us to explore the places and the ideas of them. And lastly, Pye Corner Audio, whose brilliant if more familiar lost 70s sci-fi soundtracks meet dark alleys work has been around for a while, but have changed with Let's Emerge, a record that's a feeling of breathing out and being reembraced beyond your own body as lockdown ended. That record for me placed emotion and separation through the lens of the nostalgic instrumentation and the drift of our altered present full of the ghosts of other possible futures I do go on, eh? Anyway, Mark Fisher's essays spoke very powerfully to me, and while I won't go on any more here, the political element of one's financial, physical and emotional inhabiting of the present, how it relates to received or rewritten pasts and futures, is musically fascinating to me. This music all has a tangible connection and power for me (in a way that, sorry, Belbury Poly doesn't even if it sounds ok). Fisher would very much advocate seeing these experiences and the articulation of them as a social and systematic process. I'm not surprised so many of us resonate with their potential.
Crivens! I should have just handed this one over to you, methinks. I knew there were things dotted throughout this one that were very dear to you, and the girth of your response above is testament to those enflamed passions. I hope I managed to do (some) justice to the source material, and kept a thread running that maintained my thoughts and interpretations for that interminable 24+ minutes. From a nuts-n-bolts point of view, it was a lot of fun assembling all the frou-frou...the old BBC idents and continuity, the PIF clips, yadda yadda. I was also keen to break out of the pure electronic/sample-based strictures, so very happy to see you agreeing with me on the H-aspects of Lynch's oeuvre. It's not something I read/encounter much, but "Floating Into The Night" is so clearly hauntological that it gave me pause for thought...Am I missing something? Have I got this wrong? I guess I shouldn't worry, really. The golden rule seems to be that if it feels hauntological, then of course it bloody is. That's the point, after all. I'm, as ever, (slowly) following up on all the suggestions thrown my way down here, but the Jane Weaver one is the flashing-lights-and-klaxons one at the moment. I'm on it. Politics, eh? Was there ever a more ripe time for some clever soul out there to package up some of the key ideas of Marxism in a way that will introduce it to a generation who have been fed nothing but free-market neo-lib dogma from birth? I fear the only cure for the kind of populism we see nowadays, is to seed this generation (and the ones that follow) with the old ideas, refreshed. The hackneyed trope of communism being tried "but never done right" needs to be twisted around, I think. Fifty years in the free-market bell-jar, and you'd think that people would begin to notice how stale the air's getting...but, hey, look over there! "Leftists"! The marketplace of ideas got Starbucked, and it's high time someone got busy with the loose-leaf and reminded them what a proper brew tastes like. Pah. I'm done. Take care, rhythm pal. D
@@discellanyI loved the video, old chum. There's a line between the music journalism use of Hauntology (broadly: Gen X man likes sound clips of his youth, remembers the Protect and Survive films, wants to look clever (I'm pointing at you, Simon Reynolds)) and the Fisher version (lost futures in the present; loss in the present from the echoes of the past; Marxist interpretation of our culture through the way these things form an ongoing, almost audible dialectic). I liked that you spoke to the best of both views without the reductionism of genre, and without having to go on at length like I did in the comments. And the whole bloody point is to find these references and approaches and enjoy them. Those who limit it to just electronica and I Remember This Blorp From The Old Times are missing the point. I also love watching smart people show their working and have ideas that make me scurry off and relisten to things with new ears. NEW EARS. Can you imagine if the left really was making the kind of dominant takeover that the nutters on the right keep saying it has? It'd be bloody marvellous. There certainly seem to be a lot of younger people talking about Marxism and desperate for a different future that doesn't involve us all being rendered into glue in the offshore bank accounts of Elon and friends. If they want a grizzled old man to use too many syllables and then need a sit down nearby while the Do A Revolution, I'm there for them.
I think you can add some TV that was around that 99/00 era as well, Channel 4's late night stuff, The Trip as its prime example......the first series of Look Around You...... Also, was The Caretaker involved with V/VM?
RIP Angelo, your theory does have some form of truth in it. I personally believe its more to do with the recording location, and if there may or may not be spirits attached to the artist.
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Great video. A subject I've become quite familiar with over the last few years. After watching an episode of Look Around You the TH-cam gods recommended a few explainer videos on Hauntology, then I got into watching the various Mark Fisher lectures on repeat, and it then just spiralled from there. I think Fisher really illuminated for me the notion that neoliberalism has effectively destroyed music and popular culture as a force of any potency. Those 30 years of the post-war consensus created the unique conditions that allowed so many incredible artists to flourish. You can almost track the decline as neoliberalism truly started to assert itself as the dominant all encompassing ideology. The 80s and 90s were the hangover, but you could see things slowly starting to degrade as the 2000s wore on. It's something I think about a lot.
Interesting, think back pre-internet how music and art were very local......certain towns, cities having a certain "sound". I think the Internet absolutely killed that.
Great video! Mark Fisher is a hero of mine, and has figured very heavily in my current academic work as I work toward my MFA. I’m going to use this to show folks the relevance of social theory to everyday life.
Great sequence of hauntingly beautiful music: Broadcast….The Caretaker….my cuppa tea as well.
Broadcast are a very important band for me. I love you Trish! Stereolab, m'eh. Portishead? Darkly amazing crackle-core. Boards Of Canada's 'Geogaddi' is just such a classic. I think the DLP myth is slightly spurious but they're grimly great all the same. Bryars, Burial? All good :-)
I gotta say while I have looked into and have been fascinated with hauntology as a philosophical theory, I have yet to think of it in terms of art, specifically music in this case. Great video exploring this. It gives me a lot to think about.
Great work! ‘Deja-fuel’. Ha!
When I saw the title, I thought maybe The Fall (Part 2), but was not disappointed! I’m a member in good standing of the Broadcast/BOC/Stereolab club, so found their placement in the musical hauntology realm (“genre” doesn’t really cover it) very interesting. This seems to have kinship with the idea of liminal spaces. Past futures that never were, as you said. i’m pleased to just now discover your channel and have lots to catch up on. Thank you!
I'm looking forward to the new year, when my current series of videos is done, and I can return to more (but less regular) of this kind of thing...including part two of The Fall! I have notes and assorted stuff prepared for that one, and would love to finish what I started. Glad you enjoyed the video, hope you find more around here that float your boat. Cheers, D
Many of Joe Meek's production work from the 50s and 60s definitely has a haunting quality as well, famous examples are Telstar and John Leyton's Johnny Remember Me... but there are a lot (a lot!) more gems and intriguing one or less hit (could have been contenders?) wonders. Point being (I guess): he had an interesting way to manipulate the sound of the studio to haunting effect.
The racing game Retrowave has a very interesting Vaporwave soundtrack. There's a playlist on TH-cam. Recommended! Such a trippy game.
Poor Fukuyama! History's still going... d'oh!
This is great, been getting more and more into theory since 2017 B)
I was previously unfamiliar with this concept, but as you were defining it, I wondered if you were going to mention vapor wave, which I had been exposed to prior.
Funnily enough, the theology professor that performed my wedding ceremony wrote her thesis on Derrida, though we never discussed it in detail since I was (and still am) unfamiliar with his work.
I'm always grateful to learn new things, and your videos have become a favorite source of new information.
Thanks Chris. Yeah Derrida's a big name in modern philosophical thought...the whole idea of "deconstruction" was his, so a very influential thinker in post-modern circles. Cheers, D
Negativland - Dispepsi (1997) is a wonderful example. A concept album about the cola wars of the 1980's
Thought provoking.
Surely beauty is in the Ear of the beholder? For me, music provides emotional triggers, it stirs your soul. How can someone I have never met bring me to tears or make me jump up and demonstrate horrific Dad dancing? That's why its my antidote to the discipline, rigour, logic and detachment of the everyday existence.
I too mourn the loss of small venues, always the best way to experience live music. I feel this was driven by the flip from Touring to promote record/CD sales to the Streaming era, where ticket sales became the main source of income for Bands and their labels.
As an optimist, on the theme of Hauntology being about what we lost or what might have been, in time the addiction to social media will decline and re-ignite our desire for community and a resurgence in small, local "arts" venues. You may say I'm a dreamer...
When the rubber hits the road, all critical theory goes out the window and you're left with the one question..."Do I like it?"...So, yes, this stuff is fun to speculate about and expound upon, but it doesn't really matter in the end.
I do think the current model is unsustainable, and hope that things improve...but if recent history has taught us anything, it's that just when you think things have got as bad as they could, well...y'know. All you can do as a listener is support the music you love where and when you can, and hope common sense prevails somewhere down the line. Cheers, D
nice :)
A declared interest: Several of these bands are among my all-time favourites - Boards of Canada, Stereolab, Broadcast (and a related aside - I meant to ask if you enjoyed Jane Weaver - her last few albums have been, for me, astonishingly good, and Modern Kosmology is almost a dialog or duet with Broadcast at times). As I've said before somewhere, BoC sound like memories feel, especially when you grow to recognise your own unreliability. Even where their sounds aren't actually a part of that time at all, they create how those memories sounded and wrap an undercurrent into the partially recalled, very much a hug from the past with spikes in it that makes both past and present more vivid even if it's at the cost of literal accuracy. The warp, glaze and wooze of theirs is an aural equivalent of the decay of photographs and the mind's eye. This band changed my life, man, by feeling like they were always a part of it. Or something.
But anyway, a couple of other thoughts that I had watching. Firstly Lynch, who launches your musical alt futures, is fascinating for how he has also managed to warp the historic music he uses, to somehow retroactively render it hauntological, impossible to hear without its use in reinforcing his movie's moods supplanting it's real history and recasting the 1950s in ways there was no articulation for at the time. It's very hard to hear an Apple Pie Harmony and Love 50s song these days without it immediately introducing a creeping dread that is very much about what we've done since. He's a darker Dennis Potter perhaps, given how Potter reframed lives lived in music by colonising the songs with his character's dreams of never achieved futures. My point, perhsis, is that the exploration of the politics and feelings of lost/alternative histories/futures through music involves many contexts and can actively warp backwards
Secondly, there are some wonderful things going on in the "men in their 50s make synth music" world that isn't "just" the Ghost Boxification sound. I'm thinking of three very different engagement with our environment - whether personal, political or emotional - through old instrumentation and decaying or doctored sounds. I'm thinking firstly of Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan (or WazzaRunco Thingy as me and my mates refer to him in short). His music is explicitly based on the lost futures dreamt post war, and the ghosts of a lost economy and the attitudes of those paternalistic town planners who wanted to build streets in the sky, and ended up making something very different. As flawed as the economic or social planning was, and as a result of how these futures were all exterminated in the erasure of Thatcher's 70s, now some of those ageing or delapidated buildings are the only landmarks to negotiate the bleak wasteland that became of working class economic reality. It's almost as if the buildings themselves are the ghosts, and his music contains that mood as a haunting, as well as a swell of anger that starts with the presumptions of the planners and burns as the remnants of the lost future becomes more derelict.
Second, there's the gorgeous Craven Faults, plugging into a far older environment of nature, not pastoral or romantic, but utterly rooted in actual places of remote isolation and long weathered geology. Again using analog Synths He somehow makes the most organic and personal sounds from the chattering machines and rotating tapes, sounds that very much allow us to explore the places and the ideas of them. And lastly, Pye Corner Audio, whose brilliant if more familiar lost 70s sci-fi soundtracks meet dark alleys work has been around for a while, but have changed with Let's Emerge, a record that's a feeling of breathing out and being reembraced beyond your own body as lockdown ended. That record for me placed emotion and separation through the lens of the nostalgic instrumentation and the drift of our altered present full of the ghosts of other possible futures
I do go on, eh? Anyway, Mark Fisher's essays spoke very powerfully to me, and while I won't go on any more here, the political element of one's financial, physical and emotional inhabiting of the present, how it relates to received or rewritten pasts and futures, is musically fascinating to me. This music all has a tangible connection and power for me (in a way that, sorry, Belbury Poly doesn't even if it sounds ok). Fisher would very much advocate seeing these experiences and the articulation of them as a social and systematic process. I'm not surprised so many of us resonate with their potential.
Crivens! I should have just handed this one over to you, methinks. I knew there were things dotted throughout this one that were very dear to you, and the girth of your response above is testament to those enflamed passions. I hope I managed to do (some) justice to the source material, and kept a thread running that maintained my thoughts and interpretations for that interminable 24+ minutes.
From a nuts-n-bolts point of view, it was a lot of fun assembling all the frou-frou...the old BBC idents and continuity, the PIF clips, yadda yadda. I was also keen to break out of the pure electronic/sample-based strictures, so very happy to see you agreeing with me on the H-aspects of Lynch's oeuvre. It's not something I read/encounter much, but "Floating Into The Night" is so clearly hauntological that it gave me pause for thought...Am I missing something? Have I got this wrong? I guess I shouldn't worry, really. The golden rule seems to be that if it feels hauntological, then of course it bloody is. That's the point, after all.
I'm, as ever, (slowly) following up on all the suggestions thrown my way down here, but the Jane Weaver one is the flashing-lights-and-klaxons one at the moment. I'm on it.
Politics, eh? Was there ever a more ripe time for some clever soul out there to package up some of the key ideas of Marxism in a way that will introduce it to a generation who have been fed nothing but free-market neo-lib dogma from birth? I fear the only cure for the kind of populism we see nowadays, is to seed this generation (and the ones that follow) with the old ideas, refreshed. The hackneyed trope of communism being tried "but never done right" needs to be twisted around, I think. Fifty years in the free-market bell-jar, and you'd think that people would begin to notice how stale the air's getting...but, hey, look over there! "Leftists"! The marketplace of ideas got Starbucked, and it's high time someone got busy with the loose-leaf and reminded them what a proper brew tastes like. Pah. I'm done. Take care, rhythm pal. D
@@discellanyI loved the video, old chum. There's a line between the music journalism use of Hauntology (broadly: Gen X man likes sound clips of his youth, remembers the Protect and Survive films, wants to look clever (I'm pointing at you, Simon Reynolds)) and the Fisher version (lost futures in the present; loss in the present from the echoes of the past; Marxist interpretation of our culture through the way these things form an ongoing, almost audible dialectic). I liked that you spoke to the best of both views without the reductionism of genre, and without having to go on at length like I did in the comments. And the whole bloody point is to find these references and approaches and enjoy them. Those who limit it to just electronica and I Remember This Blorp From The Old Times are missing the point. I also love watching smart people show their working and have ideas that make me scurry off and relisten to things with new ears. NEW EARS.
Can you imagine if the left really was making the kind of dominant takeover that the nutters on the right keep saying it has? It'd be bloody marvellous. There certainly seem to be a lot of younger people talking about Marxism and desperate for a different future that doesn't involve us all being rendered into glue in the offshore bank accounts of Elon and friends. If they want a grizzled old man to use too many syllables and then need a sit down nearby while the Do A Revolution, I'm there for them.
I think you can add some TV that was around that 99/00 era as well, Channel 4's late night stuff, The Trip as its prime example......the first series of Look Around You......
Also, was The Caretaker involved with V/VM?
RIP Angelo, your theory does have some form of truth in it. I personally believe its more to do with the recording location, and if there may or may not be spirits attached to the artist.
RIP Trish Keenan, one of the most gorgeous haunting voices ever. I still obsess over the Black Session tape its so beautifully done.
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